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Rumors and Insurrection

Lacy K. Ford, Jr.

in Deliver Us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South

This chapter examines the immediate reaction of upper South whites to the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia. The deep fear and persistent anxiety that the ... More

This chapter examines the immediate reaction of upper South whites to the publication of David Walker's Appeal and Nat Turner's slave revolt in Virginia. The deep fear and persistent anxiety that the Turner insurrection aroused among upper South whites, and white Virginians especially, is discussed as background to a growing popular interest in accelerating the demographic reconfiguration of slavery in the region.Less

Exodus: Israelite Deliverance and Antebellum Hope

Herbert Robinson Marbury

in Pillars of Cloud and Fire: The Politics of Exodus in African American Biblical Interpretation

This chapter recounts the antebellum period, describing the political and social contexts of two African American interpreters: Absalom Jones and David Walker. In 1808, Absalom Jones delivered his ... More

This chapter recounts the antebellum period, describing the political and social contexts of two African American interpreters: Absalom Jones and David Walker. In 1808, Absalom Jones delivered his celebrated “Thanksgiving Sermon” based on Exodus 3 to a well-established congregation at Philadelphia's African Episcopal Church. He deployed a pillar of cloud politics that balanced his ecclesial community's commitments to justice for enslaved African Americans with concerns for their own survival and social uplift. Two decades later in Boston, David Walker, a Methodist layperson, published the first edition of his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Using references to the exodus story throughout, Walker's missive is a display of his pillar of fire politics of the first order. It is oriented toward emancipation through nothing less than open rebellion. From radically different vantage points, both figures take up the exodus story to transform black social reality.Less

The Myth of Nature’s Nation: The Revolutionary Period

Richard T. Hughes

in Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning

The American myth of Nature’s Nation claims that the United States, and especially its founding documents, owe nothing to human history but reflect the natural order as it came from the hands of the ... More

The American myth of Nature’s Nation claims that the United States, and especially its founding documents, owe nothing to human history but reflect the natural order as it came from the hands of the Creator. Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence speaks of “self-evident truths,” rooted in “Nature and Nature’s God.” But the founders read into the natural order the long-standing myth of White Supremacy. In this way, the myth of Nature’s Nation became a tool for exclusion and oppression of people of color. In his “Notes on the State of Virginia,” Thomas Jefferson even argued that black inferiority was nature’s own decree. From an early date, blacks fought back. David Walker led that charge with his 1829 book, Walker’s Appeal . . . to the Coloured Citizens of the World. In the twenty-first century, other black writers—especially Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates—unmasked the ways in which the myth of White Supremacy is embedded in the American myth of Nature’s Nation.Less

Prophesying the Multiracial Republic

Sandra M. Gustafson

in Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic

This chapter explores deliberations on the multiracial American republic. William Apess, Maria Stewart, and David Walker are stated to have employed prophetic rhetoric to advance a multiracial ideal ... More

This chapter explores deliberations on the multiracial American republic. William Apess, Maria Stewart, and David Walker are stated to have employed prophetic rhetoric to advance a multiracial ideal of the modern republic based on full citizenship rights, equality before the law, and inclusive deliberations. Each author shaped a distinctive version of the jeremiad to address specific activist communities: Walker wrote as a member of a developing and predominantly male transnational black public sphere; Stewart sought to engage and reform the civil society of black Boston, with the ultimate aim of ending white oppression; and Apess contributed to a multiracial opposition effort that supported the Cherokee republic and focused on native rights. Collectively these classics of American protest writing make visible the deliberative crisis produced by racial prejudice and legal exclusion that needed to be remedied if the ideals of the multiracial republic were to be realized.Less

The Politics of Early African American Literature

Gene Andrew Jarrett

in Representing the Race: A New Political History of African American Literature

This chapter looks at the debate between Thomas Jefferson and David Walker—an African American author—over whether New World African intellectual culture should be an entrance examination to the ... More

This chapter looks at the debate between Thomas Jefferson and David Walker—an African American author—over whether New World African intellectual culture should be an entrance examination to the early American polity. It provides a reading of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and its 1829 critique, David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. In Notes, Jefferson's dismissal of the ability of blacks to reason and imagine, and then to produce exceptional literature, was so reprehensible that subsequent generations of black writers sought to refute it. Indeed, Walker attempts to debunk Jefferson's prescription of reason and imagination for political citizenship by taking advantage of his membership in an educated black elite whose broad grasp of Western history and whose access to the resources of print culture enhanced its authority in the public sphere.Less

Religion and Violence in Black and White

Eddie S. Glaude

in From Jeremiad to Jihad: "Religion, Violence, and America"

This chapter considers how the centrality of religion and violence play a significant role in the struggles of the African Americans for liberty and equality. The two provide a revealing lens for the ... More

This chapter considers how the centrality of religion and violence play a significant role in the struggles of the African Americans for liberty and equality. The two provide a revealing lens for the interpretation of racial injustice in America, as well as the efforts to correct it. In particular, the accounts of David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, two African American leaders who called for armed slave revolt, demonstrate the importance of biblical stories and prophetic rhetoric to mobilize a subjugated people. Both figures appealed to racial solidarity grounded in concerted efforts to achieve freedom. Their rhetorics have offered divergent understandings of the relationship between black slaves and white citizens.Less

The Myth of the Christian Nation: The Early National Period

Richard T. Hughes

in Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories That Give Us Meaning

While America’s founders sought to create a nation of religious freedom, not a Christian nation, Christians in the early nineteenth century effectively Christianized the American Republic through the ... More

While America’s founders sought to create a nation of religious freedom, not a Christian nation, Christians in the early nineteenth century effectively Christianized the American Republic through the Second Great Awakening. Over the course of American history, many whites have accepted the claim that America is a Christian nation. Blacks from an early date, however, have argued that Christian America is a hollow concept, informed by assumptions of white supremacy. In the nineteenth century, David Walker ridiculed the notion of Christian America, while Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells claimed that the idea of Christian America was a cover for horrendous crimes against blacks. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, blacks as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and James Cone unmasked the myth of a Christian America. By the twenty-first century, the collapse of Christian dominance in the United States could be traced, at least in part, to the complicity of white American Christians in the myth of White Supremacy. Many white Christians responded by attempting to restore a lost golden age, ignoring their complicity in the myth of White Supremacy that had helped bring on America’s fourth time of trial.Less

The Banneker Age: Black Afterlives of Early National Science

Britt Rusert

in Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture

This chapter identifies Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787) as a “founding text” for a vibrant genealogy of black scientific discourse in the early national and antebellum ... More

This chapter identifies Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785, 1787) as a “founding text” for a vibrant genealogy of black scientific discourse in the early national and antebellum periods, from Benjamin Banneker’s 1791 correspondence with Jefferson to David Walker’s 1829 Appeal, James Pennington’s 1844 ethnology, and James McCune Smith’s essays on Notes, written in 1859, on the cusp of the Civil War. It also examines the widespread memorialization of Benjamin Banneker by African Americans in the antebellum period, an act that, among other things, used Banneker to imagine the beginning of a new scientific age, marked by anti-racism and emancipatory politics.Less

Believing in Ethiopians

Maghan Keita

in African Athena: New Agendas

This chapter discusses contributions of African American intellectuals to the debates inherent to Martin Bernal's controversial thesis on the origins of Western Classical Civilization. Pre‐dating ... More

This chapter discusses contributions of African American intellectuals to the debates inherent to Martin Bernal's controversial thesis on the origins of Western Classical Civilization. Pre‐dating Bernal, before the American Revolution and through the late twentieth century, a case is made for the historical development of Africa‐centered histories and historiographies that were both nuanced and varied. Here, the prototypes for a serious and multifaceted set of intellectual inquiries now conventionally called “Afrocentrism” were lodged in the works of black luminaries such as Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Drucilla Dunjee Houston, William Leo Hansberry, and Frank M. Snowden, Jr. Each showed different approaches, perspectives, and biases in regard to a black presence in the Classical Age, yet each was assured that such a presence was historically grounded and consequential for all of humanity.Less

The Crisis of the Nation: Contending Voices in Prophecy

Christopher Z. Hobson

in The Mount of Vision: African American Prophetic Tradition, 1800-1950

Prophetic thinkers disputed whether the nation could ever overcome its sin of oppression. These differences affected agendas for change and debates over emigration. The majority, reflecting ... More

Prophetic thinkers disputed whether the nation could ever overcome its sin of oppression. These differences affected agendas for change and debates over emigration. The majority, reflecting redemptive strands in biblical prophecy, foresaw a bright if distant future within the United States and oriented their congregants to a generations-long struggle for equality.Less

Evangelist and Organizer { 1831–1833 }

Philip F. Gura

in Life of William Apess, Pequot

This chapter focuses on William Apess's life as evangelist and organizer during the years 1831–1833. In the early summer of 1830, Apess was one of three preachers at a fundraiser for the Associated ... More

This chapter focuses on William Apess's life as evangelist and organizer during the years 1831–1833. In the early summer of 1830, Apess was one of three preachers at a fundraiser for the Associated Methodist Church in New York City. Apess's sermon was on the prophesied accelerating growth of the Methodist Episcopal Church through temporal history. For the next several years, Apess's ministry unfolded beyond New York City proper, for he returned as a missionary among the Pequot Indians in Connecticut. From this base, he traveled throughout southern New England, preaching and soliciting funds for the tribe's spiritual welfare. The rest of this chapter discusses Apess's travel to Boston, where African Americans such as David Walker were fighting for abolitionism, and to southeastern Massachusetts, where he helped the Mashpee Indians in their struggle for self-government.Less

“His Terrible Swift Sword”

James P. Byrd

in A Holy Baptism of Fire and Blood: The Bible and the American Civil War

The Civil War resulted from a division that existed since the nation’s founding. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, “slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All ... More

The Civil War resulted from a division that existed since the nation’s founding. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, “slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war.” This division pitted those who believed slavery to be a biblical institution—and compatible with the ideals of the nation—against those who believed slavery violated both scripture and the nation’s founding ideals. This chapter narrates the Bible’s use to support and to attack slavery in the decades leading up to the Civil War, focusing especially on uses of scripture to support violence.Less

Race, Reenactment, and the “Natural-Born Citizen”

Tavia Nyong’o

in Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

This chapter focuses on the “historical” claims of the Tea Party movement as it reorients and reinvents the Revolutionary War archive. The temporal bend that loops the Tea Party to this revolutionary ... More

This chapter focuses on the “historical” claims of the Tea Party movement as it reorients and reinvents the Revolutionary War archive. The temporal bend that loops the Tea Party to this revolutionary event camouflages its stronger historical investment in the 14th Amendment's post-Civil War reversal of the foundational terms of citizenship. Tracing the “queasiness” of this time-shifting alliance with white racial innocence, the chapter sets a contemporary performance of archival reenactment against the creative engagement with citizenship portrayed in David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Its analysis of the Tea-Party inspired reading of the Constitution is shaped by two books, Rebecca Schneider's Performing Remains (2011) and Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes (2010), both of which engage aspects of historical reenactment culture in America.Less

The World of Hosea Easton and David Walker

Richard Archer

in Jim Crow North: The Struggle for Equal Rights in Antebellum New England

Hosea Easton and David Walker described and analyzed racism in New England during the late 1820s. New England had initially been more receptive to its black population than were other sections of the ... More

Hosea Easton and David Walker described and analyzed racism in New England during the late 1820s. New England had initially been more receptive to its black population than were other sections of the United States, but as their populations of free people of African descent dramatically increased, states began to reverse themselves. By the 1820s, laws forbade free people of African descent from marrying whites, employment was limited to the most menial jobs, and education—where available—was inadequate. African Americans could not serve on juries or hold public office. Their housing opportunities were restricted, and they were segregated in church seating. They were barred from theaters, hotels, hospitals, stagecoaches, and steamships. Worst of all, whites denied blacks their humanity. Their belief that people of color were inferior to themselves underlay slavery and racism.Less

In Plain Sight: Slavery and the Architecture of Democracy

John Levi Barnard

in Empire of Ruin: Black Classicism and American Imperial Culture

This chapter elaborates three primary elements of “black classicism” that African American writers, editors, and activists would develop in relation to dominant modes of classicism and monumental ... More

This chapter elaborates three primary elements of “black classicism” that African American writers, editors, and activists would develop in relation to dominant modes of classicism and monumental culture: the appropriation of the classically inflected rhetoric of revolutionary liberty to the cause of radical abolitionism; the critical juxtaposition of the neoclassical architecture of national buildings and monuments with images of the infrastructure of slavery; and the imaginative transformation of these buildings and monuments from icons of democracy and civilization to symbols of imperial hubris and harbingers of ruin. The chapter traces these developments through the pages of black newspapers and abolitionist polemics by radical figures such as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and especially William Wells Brown. Brown draws together all the elements of antebellum black classicism in writings across a number of genres, from memoir and travel narrative to moving panorama, antislavery lecture, and finally his novel Clotel.Less

Captivity, Desire, Trade: The Forging of National Form

Lindon Barrett

Justin A. Joyce, Dwight A. Mcbride, and John Carlos Rowe (eds)

in Racial Blackness and the Discontinuity of Western Modernity

This chapter continues the discussion of Equiano/Vassa's autobiography, focusing on its role in the literary tradition as the most important eighteenth-century slave narrative in order for Barrett to ... More

This chapter continues the discussion of Equiano/Vassa's autobiography, focusing on its role in the literary tradition as the most important eighteenth-century slave narrative in order for Barrett to set up the long tradition of the fugitive slave narrative in its pre-classic (prior to 1800), classic (1830–1865), and postbellum (1865 and later) versions. It then turns to a number of fugitive slave narratives and related abolitionist texts from the classic period: William Grimes's Narrative of the Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave (1855); James Bradley's 1835 journalistic account of his own enslavement; David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America (1829); Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845) and My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).Less

A Nation Born in a Day

Matthew Harper

in The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation

This chapter describes black southerners’ experience of emancipation and the theological meanings they gave the event. Emancipation was the key moment in black Protestants’ understanding of God’s ... More

This chapter describes black southerners’ experience of emancipation and the theological meanings they gave the event. Emancipation was the key moment in black Protestants’ understanding of God’s plan for history. The chapter follows closely one Methodist congregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, as Union troops occupied the city. Black worshippers sought religious independence and flouted rules of racial submission. The chapter argues that antebellum black southerners prophesied the coming of emancipation. Some saw emancipation as the beginning of a millenial age of church growth. They interpreted freedom in different ways, using different biblical narratives. Those differences appeared as political divisions in North Carolina’s 1865 Freedmen’s Convention. Every year thereafter, black southerners commemorated the anniversary of emancipation, ensuring that its theological importance waxed rather than waned over time.Less

The Rebel and the Professor: Nat Turner, Thomas Roderick Dew, and the Utility of Slavery

Alfred L. Brophy

in University, Court, and Slave: Proslavery Academic Thought and Southern Jurisprudence, 1831–1861

The Nat Turner rebellion of August 1831 sets this book in motion. In the wake of the violence of the rebellion and the brutal reprisals in its aftermath, the Virginia legislature debated a gradual ... More

The Nat Turner rebellion of August 1831 sets this book in motion. In the wake of the violence of the rebellion and the brutal reprisals in its aftermath, the Virginia legislature debated a gradual abolition plan. Then William and Mary history professor Thomas Dew wrote an assessment of the debates and argued that slavery should not be ended. His extensive treatise surveyed the history of slavery from ancient times to the present and the economic utility of slavery in Virginia. Dew’s treatise, which subtly engaged with David Walker’s Appeal, argued that even gradual abolition of slavery was impractical. Dew’s treatise was persuasive to many; academics continued to expand on many of his themes from its publication in 1832 until the Civil War.Less

River Runaways

Philip Gerard

in The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina

William B. Gould, a skilled artisan who worked on the Bellamy mansion as a hired-out slave, makes his daring midnight escape by boat with seven companions down the Cape Fear River past the river ... More

William B. Gould, a skilled artisan who worked on the Bellamy mansion as a hired-out slave, makes his daring midnight escape by boat with seven companions down the Cape Fear River past the river forts and the slave catcher patrols. He is one of 331,000 slaves in the state-many of whom carry on an invisible and subversive life out of sight of the white plantation owners. Gould’s band makes it to freedom, and he joins the U.S. Navy to hunt down blockade runners.Less